The Red-Army Blues

By Kevin Fedarko

When Defense Minister Pavel Grachev appeared before the Russian parliament two weeks ago, everyone expected that his visit would be the political equivalent of a burning at the stake. His numerous critics were eager to toss a branch onto the fire that seemed about to consume the career of the 46-year- old paratroop veteran of the Afghan War who was promoted to Defense Minister three years ago. As the general who oversaw the final withdrawal of his country's army from eastern Germany last August -- an exercise most Russian soldiers still find humiliating -- Grachev has become the embodiment of every ailment besetting the once-mighty military. Communists and nationalists vilify him for the army's loss of prestige and morale. Reformers castigate him for its inefficiency and widespread corruption. Even Grachev's own troops would like to see him go; a recent poll conducted by a German public interest group indicated that officers are so embittered by poor housing, paltry pay and pathetic prospects for the future that only 20% approve of Grachev.

As the Defense Minister stepped to the podium, he nervously grabbed the sides for support, anticipating a barrage of criticism. But within minutes, Grachev had managed to turn the tables on his adversaries. He did so by detailing, in graphic terms, the sorry state of a military that only five years ago was one of the most formidable armed forces in the world. He ticked off the problems like a list of battlefield defeats: pinched budgets, poor equipment, low recruitment rates, unpaid salaries and a decline in military preparedness so precipitous that not a single ground-force training maneuver has been carried out at the divisional level since 1992. Implicit in his words was the accusation that it is parliament, which controls the purse strings, and not the Defense Minister, who merely distributes the resources he is given, that bears the blame. "Not a single army in the world is in such a catastrophic state," Grachev told the Deputies. "I ask you to take this as a warning."

The spirited offensive served to deflect parliament's fire away from Grachev himself, and no vote was taken to call for his dismissal. But when he dropped out of a government visit to the Gulf region last week, the presumption was that he had finally fallen from official favor. In fact, Grachev had become ill after speaking to the parliament and checked into a hospital for medical tests.

The political debate has done nothing to quiet the sensational revelations of military wrongdoing that have flooded the press during the past two months. In a nation where men in uniform were once accorded a respect that borders on reverence, ordinary citizens were outraged to read reports that officers from the Western Group of Forces in Germany had personally profited from the withdrawal of Russian troops. The dimensions of the scandal are hard to measure, but by some estimates the state may have lost as much as $65 million to illegal financial deals involving the sale of military property in Germany during the past four years. To defuse mounting public criticism, President Boris Yeltsin dismissed General Matvei Burlakov from his post as Deputy Defense Minister "to protect the honor of the Russian armed forces."

While Grachev claims that he had nothing to do with those abuses, the scandal seems to reach higher with each passing week. Last week Major General Nikolai Seliverstov, the former first deputy commander of the 16th Russian Air Force, based in Germany, went before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court to defend himself against similar charges of bribery, fraud and embezzlement. Seliverstov argued that the officers in Germany were under orders to engage in business to earn profits for the cash-strapped military. Any wrong he might have done, he suggested, resulted from inexperience in commerce, not from criminal intent.

The long-simmering corruption scandal in Germany came into the open with the murder of Dmitri Kholodov, a 27-year-old Moscow journalist who was blown up on Oct. 17 by a booby-trapped briefcase. Since Kholodov had been investigating military corruption, some outraged journalists and democratic reformers jumped to the conclusion, as yet to be proved, that Grachev was somehow involved. He has also been hurt by stories published in Moskovsky Komsomolets, the scandal- mongering paper where Kholodov was employed, reporting that the Defense Minister and his aides have bought furniture and foreign luxury cars with money earmarked for the construction of new housing for troops coming home from Eastern Europe. The stories inspired Russia's popular press to dub Grachev "Pasha Mercedes."

Although the Defense Minister denies the accusations, the persistent charges strike a powerful chord in military ranks, where living and working conditions have grown desperate. Housing is so scarce that many of the 650,000 troops returning from outposts of the old Soviet empire are now living in tents. Krasnaya Zvezda, the official daily of the Defense Ministry, regularly publishes front-page letters from angry servicemen. In a recent issue, headlined WE CAN'T LIVE LIKE THIS, a group of military wives near Saratov complained that their husbands were not getting paid, noting that "there is nothing to feed the children." The resident of one apartment block at an airport near Khabarovsk reported that "every single day for the past two years, our house has been without water, electricity and heating." In an appalling demonstration of the mistreatment of recruits and their meager food rations, in March 1993 four sailors on Russky Island in the Far East died of malnutrition.

Last summer 380 recruits were given a taste of how bad things have become when they took part in a two-week training exercise in the Ural Mountain region. After riding 11 hours in a train without the use of a toilet, some recruits were outfitted in secondhand, unwashed uniforms and issued "socks" fashioned from strips of linen cloth. Five days into the course, they did not have water to brush their teeth. Yet when the recruits were required to sit for exams, each man was expected to buy his officer a bottle of vodka in order to pass.

Their training was disastrous. One day they were directed nearly five miles off course by a commander who had lost his way. The next day they were forced to wait six hours while another commander went back for the bullets he had forgotten to bring to target practice. One soldier eventually suffered what appeared to have been a heart attack; he died when he was beaten after being forced to do push-ups while wearing a gas mask. A second recruit succumbed when he was beaten so brutally by other soldiers that he suffered a brain hemorrhage. A third died of a bleeding ulcer after the doctor on base decided he was faking his pain.

Until now, Grachev's trump card has been his loyalty to Yeltsin: during the coup attempts of August 1991 and October 1993 it was Grachev's support, however reluctant, that inspired the military to stand behind the President. Yeltsin has consistently repaid Grachev by standing firmly behind his Defense Minister. Now there are signs that Yeltsin may be concluding that Grachev's liabilities outweigh his assets. The possibility that the Defense Minister may be forced to step down has already sparked a fierce debate over who might succeed him. Will Grachev be forced to make an ignominious exit? No one knows. But as long as he remains, the Defense Minister's personal predicaments only highlight the troubles of the dispirited institution he leads.

With reporting by John Kohan and Sally B. Donnelly/Moscow